Bobby Wellins born 24 January 1936

Bobby Wellins (24 January 1936 – 27 October 2016) was a Scottish tenor saxophonist.

Robert Coull Wellins was born in Glasgow. Both his father, Max Wellins, a saxophonist, and his mother, Sally Coull, a singer, were performers with the Sammy Miller Show Band, and his father was Bobby’s first saxophone teacher, introducing him to the alto at the age of 12, and then to jazz harmony on the piano, he later lived in Carnwadric and attended Shawlands Academy.  Moving south to West Sussex, Wellins studied harmony at Chichester College of Further Education, and clarinet at the RAF School of Music in Uxbridge, west London. 

In 1956-57, he worked with Buddy Featherstonhaugh’s swing band, in a lineup that included the newly arrived young Canadian expat trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. The following year, Wellins worked on US-bound ocean liners, and between 1959 and 1961 worked with two influential British drummer-leaders, Tony Crombie and Tony Kinsey, and on the saxophonist Tommy Whittle’s residency at the Dorchester hotel in London.

Ronnie Scott’s first club, founded in Gerrard Street, central London, in 1959, had begun to attract illustrious American guests by the early 60s, and the West End’s jazz scene was briefly booming. Duncan Lamont’s Nucleus club became what Wellins called his “jazz university”, an after-hours jamming haunt he would visit in the small hours after Whittle’s Dorchester gig. Wellins joined Crombie’s compositionally classy Jazz Incorporated band on its gigs at the Flamingo club, and through it met Stan Tracey - in those days the regular pianist for both Crombie and the Scott club. 

Wellins with Stan Tracey

The pair quickly realised how much they had in common, eloquently realised in 1961 on Wellins’s haunting suite Culloden Moor. Wellins was most famous for a single, exquisite improvised solo on Starless and Bible Black, from the pianist Stan Tracey’s 1965 classic Under Milk Wood – a tenor saxophone passage of birdlike warbles, mournful hoots softly blown into deep spaces, fragmentary motifs that would briefly consolidate into hints of a songlike theme.

             Here’s “Quando Quando Quando” from above album.

                                   

Tracey and Wellins were bonded in life by downbeat humour, in music by a relish for the balancing-point between lyrical warmth and Monk’s enigmatic terseness – and eventually also by the attractions of the jazz world’s easy access to narcotics. Heroin almost destroyed the careers of both of them, but with the support of family and fellow musicians, they came through it to produce enduring work for the next three decades. 

Wellins left London to live in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, with his family, and after a painful personal battle. “The downhill slope… almost broke up my family,” he told Jazz Journal in 1990, referring to his heroin and cocaine use. “My wife Isobel helped me to break free. I got off in 1975, I was 40 years old and finished with it. The affair was over.” He returned to playing and recording – notably with the albums Jubilation (1978) and Dreams Are Free (1979), and often in the company of the pianist Pete Jacobsen. 

He began teaching at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education in Chichester, toured in 1980 with the trombonist Jimmy Knepper, was a soloist in Charlie Watts’s eclectic improv-to-swing orchestra (1985-86), and worked in the 1990s in big bands led by the clarinettist and soprano saxist Bob Wilber, and with John Barnes and Spike Robinson in Tenor Madness (1996). In the 90s he also made the superb standard-songs album Don’t Worry ’Bout Me, and a memorable Billie Holiday tribute, The Satin Album, and resumed working with Tracey in 1997. 

Wellins also forged fruitful partnerships with the pianists Mark Edwards and Kirk Lightsey, forming a regular trio with the former alongside the bassist Andy Cleyndert and drummer Spike Wells that spurred some of the most poised and imaginative playing of his career. Always believing that his best was still to come, in his 70s Wellins continued to play beautifully in new partnerships, such as his duo with the pianist-composer Kate Williams on Smoke and Mirrors (2012) and in 2014 as principal soloist with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra on a dramatic, mournful and moving revisit to the Culloden Moor suite. 

In 2013, Wellins was the subject of the documentary film Dreams Are Free, directed by Gary Barber, and shown at the Brighton, Chichester and London film festivals that year. Using interview and concert footage, the film traces the rise, fall and redemption of Wellins, showing how he overcame addiction and depression, and rediscovered the desire to play after ten years away from jazz. One of his last big hits before a stroke ended his playing days was the aptly named 2010 album Time Gentlemen Please, featuring a wonderfully eclectic and imaginative set of numbers. Wellins died after a long illness on October 27, 2016, aged 80.  

(Edited from John Fordham obit & Wikipedia)